Well I've been looking it over.

While I do have duplicate hardware, it wasn't certified for clustering. I also don't have a spare set of duplicate hardware to test the clustering. That leaves out AlwaysOn.

I'm looking at Red-Gate to help with compression and Log Shipping... I'm just a little torn about the limited availability restoring proprietary backups. 2 production machines and technically like 30 dev machines. If money weren't an issue, it seems like another point of failure/stop point where you have to do further work setting up a server for the first time.

Alternately there is Async Mirroring. looking at things for one db, that looks good. But there are 5+ production db's on the server that interelate a bit. One main one, but it goes to three others for history and two others look at the main db for some data. I really don't like the idea of setting up 5 mirrors to cover this. This is where AlwaysOn would have been great.

My boss wants me to look into this other software that ghosts the hard drive or portions of it, but I'm a little nervous that the failover would be handled totally outside of sql server.